Overview

The gods of Olympus are the most colorful characters of Greek civilization: even in antiquity, they were said to be cruel, oversexed, mad, or just plain silly. Yet for all their foibles and flaws, they proved to be tough survivors, far outlasting classical Greece itself. In Egypt, the Olympian gods claimed to have given birth to pharaohs; in Rome, they led respectable citizens into orgiastic rituals of drink and sex. Under Christianity and Islam they survived as demons, allegories, and planets; and in the Renaissance, they triumphantly emerged as ambassadors of a new, secular belief in humanity. Their geographic range, too, has been little short of astounding: in their exile, the gods and goddesses of Olympus have traveled east to the walls of cave temples in China and west to colonize the Americas. They snuck into Italian cathedrals, haunted Nietzsche, and visited Borges in his restless dreams. In a lively, original history, Barbara Graziosi offers the first account to trace the wanderings of these protean deities through the millennia. Drawing on a wide range of literary and archaeological sources, The Gods of Olympus opens a new window on the ancient world, religion, mythology, and its lasting influence.

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Anne Flosnik is an accomplished, multi-award-winning British actress, with lead credits for stage, television, commercials, industrials, voice-overs, and audiobooks. Anne has garnered three AudioFile Earphones Awards, an ALA Award, and four Audie Award nominations. Her narration of Little Bee by Chris Cleave was chosen as one of the Best Audiobooks of the Year 2009 by AudioFile magazine and one of the Top 40 Best Audiobooks of 2009 by Library Journal. Barbara Graziosi is Professor of Classics at Durham University. She is the author of Inventing Homer; together with Johannes Haubold she wrote Homer: The Resonance of Epic, and completed a commentary on Iliad 6 for the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series. Together with Emily Greenwood she edited Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon, and she coedited The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies, along with George Boys-Stones and Phiroze Vasunia.

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